Asians are the country’s fastest-growing racial group — their share of the U.S. population has increased from 4.2 percent in 2000 to 5.6 percent in 2010, and is expected to reach at least 8.6 percent by 2050, the website newgeography.com has reported. The White House has estimated that by 2050, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will make up 9.7 percent of the total United States population -- over 40 million people.
Between 2000 and 2010, the Asian Pacific American population in Connecticut increased by 65 percent. Connecticut's current Asian Pacific population is 147,830, four percent of the total Connecticut population, according to the state’s Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission, an agency created by the state legislature in 2008.

Asia is now the largest source of legal immigrants to the United States, constituting 40 percent of new arrivals in 2013, according to newgeography.com. The state Commission indicates that Asian Pacific Americans can be broken down into four geographically-based groups:

South Asians, including those from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and the Maldives

In Connecticut, the largest population of Asian Pacific Americans are in Fairfield and Hartford counties, and Asians represent the majority minority in 40 percent of Connecticut school districts, according to Commission data. Recent data compiled in New Haven indicated that the Elm City’s growth in recent years, and its status as the state’s fastest growing city, has been in large part due to immigrants, including Asians.

In decades past, Asians, as other immigrants, tended to cluster in “gateway cities” and often in the densest urban neighborhoods, like New York’s Chinatown. Now the center of gravity has shifted to the suburbs, newgeography reported. Between 2000 and 2012, the Asian population in suburban areas of the nation’s 52 biggest metro areas grew 66.2 percent while those in the core cities expanded by 34.9 percent.

In a report issued last year, Connecticut’s Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission reported concerns related to education (especially English proficiency), healthcare, mental health services, job opportunities and legal services. Concerns have also been raised regarding the increasing costs of higher education in Connecticut.

For example, the Commission noted “the lack of culturally competent health care professionals, including hospital interpreters, is an overwhelming, ethnicity-specific obstacle to health care access resulting in low rates of health services utilization, high rates of emergency room use, and inadequacy of prenatal care.” The Commission also noted that “up to 53.3 percent of APAs lack English language proficiency due to the high proportion of immigrants (about 74 percent of APAs in Connecticut are foreign born).” In addition, a report by the Commission indicated that “in the last six years, there has been a 350 percent increase in need for court interpreters.”

California has long been is the most frequent location for Asian immigrants to settle, with 4.8 million currently residing in the state, according to data published by newgeography.com. New York, with 1.4 million Asians, ranks second while Texas, with 964,000, ranks third.

Asian populations are increasing quickly in the Sun Belt. Texas’ Asian population increased by 71.5 percent from 2000 through 2010, adding a net 402,277, second most in the country over that span behind California’s 1.1 million gain. Texas is home to the only city outside California and Hawaii in the top 20 of our list of the most heavily Asian U.S. cities: the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, where 37.1 percent of the 82,000 residents are Asian.

The newgeography website indicates that “One clear trend is that Asian populations are growing in areas that are on the cutting edge of the economy — in tech centers like Silicon Valley, and near New York’s global service firms (across the river from Manhattan, Jersey City is now 25 percent Asian.) Around the manufacturing and technology companies of the Detroit and Seattle areas, Asian communities are growing.

The Best Cities for Jobs in America? They’re generally not in Connecticut, according to a new national analysis, but a number of the states' leading metropolitan areas are moving up the list compared with their counterparts across the country.
The New Haven, Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, and Norwich-New London metropolitan areas all edged up the list compared with their rankings a year ago. Danbury dropped slightly. Hartford-East Hartford-West Hartford’s ranking was virtually unchanged.

The rankings of the nation’s cities was developed by the website newgeography, and published this week.

Among 92 Medium Sized Cities that were ranked, New Haven ranked #42 (up from #65 last year) and Bridgeport-Norwalk-Stamford ranked at #58 (up from #85 last year) and saw the 10th largest advance among the medium sized cities.

Danbury ranked #122 (down from #111 last year) and Norwich-New London at #231 (up from #233 last year) among 240 Small Sized Cities that were analyzed.

In the rankings of the nation’s Large Sized Cities, the Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford region ranked #48, nearly identical to last year’s ranking of #47. The top rated cities included San Jose, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, Houston, Nashville, New York City, Orlando, Dallas and Denver.

This year's rankings use five measures of growth to rank all 398 metro areas for which full data sets were available from the past 10 years.

"Large" areas include those with a current nonfarm employment base of at least 450,000 jobs.

"Midsize" areas range from 150,000 to 450,000 jobs.

"Small" areas have as many as 150,000 jobs. This year’s rankings reflect the current size of each MSAs employment.

Among all 398 cities, New Haven and Danbury were the highest ranked from Connecticut, at #207 and #208 respectively. New Haven jumped 50 places in the overall ranking compared with last year; Danbury dropped 11 slots from a year ago.

The top-ranked city overall was Bismarck, North Dakota, which ranked first out of the 398 metro areas considered in the annual roundup of The Best Cities For Jobs. A metro area of 120,000 located in the country’s fastest-growing state and near the vast Bakken oil fields, the number of jobs in Bismarck is up 3 percent over the last year and 32.4 percent since 2002. Only one MSA—Modesto, CA—changed size categories moving from “Small” to “Midsized.”

The methodology for the 2014 rankings, according to newgeography, largely corresponds to that used in previous years, which emphasizes the robustness of a region's growth both recently and over time, with a minor addition to mitigate the volatility that the Great Recession has introduced into the time series. The rankings use five measures of growth to rank all 398 metro areas for which full data sets were available from the past 10 years.

The goal of the rankings methodology, according to the publication, is to capture a snapshot of the present and prospective employment outlook in each MSA and allow the reader to have a better sense of employment climate in each.

Included are all of the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports monthly employment data. They are derived from three-month rolling averages of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics "state and area" unadjusted employment data reported from November 2002 to January 2014.